Mumbai: The Mumbai Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) has blocked a website allegedly promoting Islamic State's propaganda and was urging Indian youth to join the terror outfit.
The crackdown took place after the counter-terrorism agency stumbled upon the website while scanning internet for content that aimed at luring youth into taking up arms or joining anti-India terror outfits. The site called 'Isdarat.in' was blocked by the ATS a fortnight ago after officers saw pro-ISIS related content on its pages, according to a report in Indian Express.
ATS officials came across the site during a routine scan for suspicious online activity, but the content posted on the site was in Arabic and they had to hire an expert to help translate the literature. The material was found to be highly offensive and they immediately wrote to the centre to report their findings, following which they blocked the site.
Isdarat in Arabic means ‘to spread’ or ‘publish’ and the website was in a form of a newsletter, posting reports on the activities of the ISIS in Iraq, especially of Indian nationals who were radicalised and are fighting for their cause. The site glorified IS jihadis as ‘martyrs’ and urged Indian youth to join ‘the holy war’ the outfit is fighting under their self proclaimed Caliphate headed by the dreaded Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
There were pictures of various Indians on the site, including the four Kalyan youth - Areeb Majeed, Shaheen Tanki, Fahad Shaikh and Aman Tandel arrested in Mumbai last year for alleged IS links. The site also had photos of four alleged IM operatives-Ariz Khan alias Junaid, Md Khalid, Mirza Shadaab Baig and Mohd Sajid alias Bada Sajid, who are suspected to have joined the extremist Sunni group recently to become Jihadi fighters. The website instigated Indian youth to become lone-wolf attackers and carry terror attacks in the country.
Read:
Areeb Majid was planning a suicide attack in India, claims IS Twitter handle
“The last time IS trained its guns on Indians was when Fahad (one of the four Kalyan youth) posted a tweet threatening to kill ‘all adult males in India, if they fail to accept Islam’. The NIA was quick to react and the Twitter handle was immediately banned,” an ATS official was quoted saying in the report.
Areeb Majeed, one of the four youth from Kalyan who disappeared with his friends last year only to resurface in India later, was the first Indian national who was charged by an investigation agency on charges of fighting for the Islamic State. Investigators in their course of the probe found that Majeed was radicalised by an online site and since then the NIA and ATS became extremely vigilant and began carrying out routine online scans for jihadi propaganda.
"We have a dedicated cyber team that scans IS-related content on the internet and filters it. Key words are used to scan the content and if found to be a threat, the website is immediately blocked or pulled out,” said a senior official, explaining how the agency scouts for malicious ISIS literature on the internet.
In just the span of three months, the agency has deleted close to 1,000 offensive posts from various social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and social media platforms that were allegedly being used by ‘IS sympathisers’ for propaganda. But this is the first time that an entire site has been blocked for advocating the Islamic State's cause.
According to sources, the Internet Protocol address of the website was tracked to Indonesia but it is suspected to have been created using a proxy server. “We do not think that it originated in Indonesia and might have been floated using a proxy server. This means that finding the origin of the website becomes next to impossible,” the official said.
The ATS decided to ban the website after it found that many Indians were active on the website. “We monitored the comments page and found that day by day the number of Indian youths commenting on their website was increasing. This is alarming in nature and therefore we decided to ban it,” the official further said.
